Childhood Holocaust escapees recall British rescue effort

October 25, 2008|By Jay Hamburg, Sentinel Staff Writer

In 1939, Marianne Schleichkorn was 15 and preparing to leave her native Germany to flee the Nazis who had forced her father out of business and were tightening their stranglehold on the Jewish community.

Her parents put Schleichkorn and her younger sister on a train to Holland where they would take a boat to England. It was a last-ditch effort to save children at a time when parents had little idea how to save themselves from what would become the Holocaust.

Although the children's rescue mission has become better known in recent years, most of Schleichkorn's neighbors in Apopka are astonished to hear her story of what is called the Kindertransport.

"Most people don't know about this," said Schleichkorn, 84. "But it's important to remember."

She will be among about 100 other Kindertransport escapees in Orlando this weekend to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the effort by the British government to take in fleeing Jewish children.

"We try to teach about the terrible things that prejudice does to all ethnic groups," said Anita Hoffer, 75, of Boca Raton.

Hoffer was 6 when her parents sent her from Germany to England.

Britain agreed to accept the children after 1938's outbreak of violence against Jews, called Kristallnacht.

It was one of the few places that lifted tight immigration restrictions in the years leading up to World War II. Between 1938 and '39, about 10,000 children made it to Great Britain, where they were taken in by foster families, placed in orphanages or sent to work and study at boarding schools.

The youngsters were mostly from Jewish families in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. But the group also included some children of non-Jews who had been designated enemies of the Nazi state.

Although Schleichkorn was aware of the growing threats, her parents tried to insulate her. Not knowing that it would be almost a decade before she saw her mother and father again, Schleichkorn saw her journey as an adventure.

Her father, who had been a banker, fled to Spain and then Cuba, where he worked menial jobs. Her mother, who had converted to Judaism, went to live with her German Protestant parents who kept her safe from prying eyes.

A couple of years after the war, they all made it to New York, where her father got a job as a night watchman and her mother found work sewing labels on clothes.

Schleichkorn met her husband, a physical therapist, in New York. The two raised a family there and then retired to Florida about 20 years ago.

Despite a happy ending, Schleichkorn still doesn't talk much about it. She doesn't view her story as very different from the hard times immigrants of many backgrounds experienced trying to make a better life in America.

"It has happened to so many," she said. "I don't like to look back. Life goes on."